April 9, 2012

Today I will introduce a new feature here to tell you every week or so about a project done before this blog was started. Some of these are partly produced elsewhere on the internet, some are not, but I want to bring them here and add them to the collection in an easily navigated form for my reference, and your amusement. This week I'll tell you about the dresses I sewed the girls for my sister Joelle's wedding in 2010.

This is from my submission to the Show & Tell section of Sense & Sensibility Patterns, the place I got the pattern from. If you have not checked out this website, I highly recommend it. The designs are nice looking and come with good instructions and graded patterns on heavy paper.

Submitted to Sense & Sensibility, October 2010

I wanted to make some nice dresses for my
daughters Ultraviolet (Violet for short, 4yrs)
and Millivolt (Millie for short, 2yrs) to wear
to my sister Joelle's wedding. I had drafted a
pattern myself for empire waist style jumpers
for them in the spring, but I didn't feel that I
had time to work out a good puff sleeve and
sleeve hole design in time for the wedding in
October. My wife Becky had bought some regency
dress patterns a few years ago which I
remembered and I thought I would look for a
girls version. After a very little bit of
searching, I found this amazing site and quickly
bought the regency girls pattern. Thanks for a
wonderful site and great patterns Jennie!

My kids are on the small side of clothes, and
the measurements could have gone in different
ways, so I started with muslin versions of the
size one and three. These ended up being tight,
and the wedding was still months away so I went
with the size 2 and 4. These were a bit big, but
at least that meant they would be worn two or
three times instead of one!

I liked this color scheme a lot, though my wife
Becky said the right way to achieve it would be
to do the whole dress in red and then have a
white apron. Plus white fabric for little kids
is really asking for stains. But I went ahead
and did it this way anyhow. The skirts are white
cotton/linen blend we had bought a bolt of for
curtains a while back. The red is a regency era
print from Reproduction Fabrics my wife got a
few years ago to make herself a dress out of but
had not used yet.

The skirt and bodice are lined with a plain
white cotton fabric. I lined the sleeves too. I
added button in removable sleeves, but the
button holes in the bands got too close to the
edge of the sleeve and so won't hold the buttons
very well. Also I only put in three buttons
which wasn't really enough. Maybe I'll redo them
someday with snaps. Its too bad since the
wedding was in Carmel and it was actually very
chilly. Violet left hers in for a while, but
Millie wouldn't stand for them to get buttoned
in and so had to wear a jacket over her dress.

It was very difficult to do what ended up being
4 muslin and 2 final dresses in the 3-4 months I
had to do the project. I spent numerous Saturday
afternoons working on them with 'help' from the
girls, which was fun but of course resulted in
limited progress. I had to take a break in
August and sew them some black jumper dresses to
wear to my grandmother's funeral. So I ended up
spending many very late nights working on these
after the kids were in bed.

I can't emphasize enough how excellent the
online pictures and construction guide were in
combination with the instructions. That was very
helpful for me since I wasn't familiar with some
of the techniques used to make the dress. Now it
seems natural and in fact I used some of the
same construction methods for the funeral
jumpers I made them in August.

The last picture is of our family at my sister's
wedding. My suit is also mostly from stuff I
made myself some years ago for another wedding.
The jacket is a modified 1890s style morning
coat from a pattern I drew from a draft in a
book and then changed around a bit. I also made
the removable collar and my tie. If you can't
tell, my wife is pregnant with our third, due at
the end of March. Its a boy, which will be an
exciting change from two girls. But I'm
despairing of making boy's clothes since they
seem like they will take a lot more time and I
already have trouble finishing projects before
the kids grow out of them!